New Relic published the State of the Stacks, a report on their platform usage for different languages. On the Ruby side, there are two different camps. The pioneers using the latest and greatest: 1.9 and Rails 3.1 and 3.2 and and almost equal sized group using 1.8.7 and Rails 2.3. PostgreSQL is also the leading database solution by far.

Dotfiles, it's not always easy to track them. Some people store them inside a version controlled directory and symlink them to their home directory, but listener Matthew Bridges sent us a note about Dotify, a neat little gem he built to manage all of that. I can copy all dotfiles from your home directory, link them individually, unlink them and even edit them directly using dotify edit <dotfile> and save all of it to GitHub using dotify save.

Scopes are a neat feature of Rails 3, but what happens when you need to use a scope from an associated model to filter something on the current model. Imagine you have a User that has many articles through a Collaboration model. Now you have an article and you want to get the users that were editors on that article with a single query. The collaboration already has an editorial scope so why not use that? With Arel merge you can do exactly that, effectively using another model’s scope to filter a query.